She was the lead lawyer fighting his case against the Alberta government to have same-sex orientation added to Alberta’s human rights legislation.

The Supreme Court’s judgment was due that morning. Twenty years ago, the court didn’t post decisions to its website. They certainly didn’t tweet them out. So Greckol and the rest of the legal team gathered in her office, waiting for a colleague in Ottawa to call them with the ruling.

“Everyone had butterflies in their stomach. It was a difficult morning. I got to the office with my boyfriend and I said, ‘I can’t go in. I have to stay outside,’” Vriend, now 52, recalled.

“Suddenly, I heard a cheer through the office door, and I just collapsed. I just started crying. But they weren’t tears of joy. That cheer meant that this was the start of another day and week and month of dealing with this issue again, of dealing with the media. I’m very much an introvert. And that cheer meant there were going to a lot of happy people, a lot of people who wanted to talk to me, and I just couldn’t do it.”

Delwin Vriend hugs his mother at a rally at the Alberta legislature in April 1998.IAN JACKSON /
Edmonton Journal

Face of the battle

Vriend v. Alberta is one of the most important civil rights moments in Canadian history. The landmark case didn’t just establish gay rights in Alberta. The ruling changed people’s understanding of the Charter of Rights and the role of the courts in protecting minority communities. And Delwin Vriend became the face of that battle.

It wasn’t a role he ever sought. He still doesn’t see himself as a fighter or a rebel. An intensely private person, he never wanted to become a gay rights icon. It was just something, he says, that happened. Something that changed Alberta law and Canadian society — and changed his own fate forever.

“Luckily, it’s not part of my life any more,” says Vriend, who now makes his home in Paris, France, where he works as a website developer.

He has rarely spoken to the press about the part he played in shaping Canadian law and culture.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, you were so brave for doing this.’ But I’m not so sure I was. You just sort of do it one day at a time. I’m not sure I knew, at the beginning, that this was going to be so difficult. I didn’t want to spend my life fighting the government.”

Vriend’s path to becoming the face of Canada’s LGBTQ civil rights movement started in 1987, when he took a job as a lab instructor and laboratory co-ordinator at The King’s College, now known as The King’s University, a private Christian post-secondary institution.

A 1991 Edmonton journal file photo of Delwin Vriend in front of the old King’s College campus, taken just after he’d been fired.Larry Wong /
Edmonton Journal

Vriend was then 21. He’d been raised in the Christian Reformed Church, and had graduated from conservative Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a degree in physics and mathematics. He’d come out to his own parents that year, but for the most part, he kept his private life very private.

Vriend didn’t keep his sexual identity from his boss, a chemistry professor he much admired. He told him when he was hired. The prof said it didn’t make any difference. Good performance reviews and steady promotions marked Vriend’s four years of work at King’s.

“Some people did know I was gay and some people didn’t, I guess.”

Then, a powerful member of the King’s board of governors found out about Vriend.

“He was a major donor, from southern Alberta, and he really didn’t want me there,” Vriend said. “I was told that he threatened to pull his funding if I stayed.”

In January 1991, the college president, who had known about Vriend’s sexual orientation for some time, asked Vriend to resign. When he refused to step down, the college fired him.

For Vriend, who had just turned 25 and just become president of GALA, Edmonton’s Gay and Lesbian Awareness Group, it seemed logical to file a discrimination complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

“But they said, ‘No, we can’t take your complaint. Sexual orientation is not a protected ground. You have no basis for a complaint.”

‘All I wanted was my job back’

Vriend appealed the tribunal’s decision to Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench. He won. But the fight wasn’t over. The province appealed, successfully. And at that point, Vriend and his legal team decided to take the case to the country’s top court.

“I guess I have to thank the Alberta government for entrenching their position to such a degree that we got to take this all the way to the Supreme Court,” he said wryly.

“At the time, all I wanted was my job back. I wanted my complaint investigated. But ultimately, it was a good thing that they turned me down. Had they investigated, I might have been reinstated. Or I might have gotten a minimal pay-out. But this case wouldn’t have gone through.”

And there’s the irony of history. If the Human Rights Commission had heard Vriend’s complaint, he might have got his job back. Or the commission might well have ruled that the private Christian college was actually within its rights to dismiss him. But by fighting Vriend all the way to the Supreme Court, the Alberta government accidentally established a precedent that established and enshrined equal rights for all gay and lesbian Canadians.

Yet on that April day in 1998, Vriend found his Supreme Court victory bittersweet.

He had to brace for the torrent of hatred that spewed out after the ruling, the vehement public campaign that social conservatives launched in an effort to convince then-premier Ralph Klein to invoke the notwithstanding clause in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

He wasn’t prepared for the hate, but he also wasn’t prepared for the adulation. He wasn’t ready for the rallies and the public appearances and all the notoriety. He wasn’t prepared to be Delwin Vriend, public hero.

“Every time, I had to psych myself up for things. I had to put on a face. And people didn’t realize that,” he said.

“Guys would write to me and say, ‘Oh, you’re so cute.’ Well, I didn’t like that for very long. The problem with fame is that you’re known for something you’re not. You’re known for a part of you, but not for the real you. It was good to get out of Edmonton, so I could be the real me.”

‘Once of the best things that ever happened’

But for Vriend, Edmonton remained an uncomfortable fishbowl.

In 2000, seeking anonymity and a new career, he moved to San Francisco to work in the dot.com sector. A couple of years after that, he moved to Paris and took a position with Hewlett Packard. Today, he runs his own consulting company, developing websites for hotel chains.

When he looks back on the events that derailed his life, and set him on a different course, he has few regrets.

“This was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. It allowed me to develop into me. It got me out of the Christian Reformed Church. It forced me out as a gay man — although I hate that term. To me, ‘gay’ is a meaningless label,” he says.

“I think it did open my eyes to what was possible in the world. Alberta had been a pretty closed environment. Through the court case, I did get exposed to more of the world, and that probably allowed me to leave.”

Delwin Vriend, the reluctant civil rights advocate, in Paris, where he now lives.

But more than that, as he looks back, he’s quietly proud, not just of the victory he won for gay rights, or LGBTQ rights, but for the rights of all Canadians.

“Even at the time we were fighting our case, we didn’t just see it as a fight about sexual orientation. This was about so much more than getting sexual orientation in. The ruling says you can’t exclude people. It means every single Canadian is equal and you must include them.”

Delwin Vriend didn’t want to be a hero. His courage wasn’t so much in standing up for his rights, but in allowing himself to become a test case, the vulnerable human face of something so much larger than himself.

“I have friends who worry about making their their mark on the world, who want to try to leave the world a better place. Maybe this allows me to feel I’ve already done that, in a way,” he said.

“Fame, though? A hundred years from now, I doubt Delwin Vriend will be remembered. And that’s just fine.”

Key quotes

“Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

— The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 15(1)

“It is easy to say that everyone who is just like ‘us’ is entitled to equality. Everyone finds it more difficult to say that those who are ‘different’ from us in some way should have the same equality rights that we enjoy.

“Yet so soon as we say any enumerated or analogous group is less deserving and unworthy of equal protection and benefit of the law all minorities and all of Canadian society are demeaned.

“It is so deceptively simple and so devastatingly injurious to say that those who are handicapped or of a different race, or religion, or colour or sexual orientation are less worthy. Yet, if any enumerated or analogous group is denied the equality provided by s. 15 then the equality of every other minority group is threatened. That equality is guaranteed by our constitution.

“If equality rights for minorities had been recognized, the all too frequent tragedies of history might have been avoided. It can never be forgotten that discrimination is the antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster the dignity of every individual.”

Moderated by Paula Simons, the forum’s speakers will include Madame Justice Sheila Greckol of the Alberta Court of Appeal (lead counsel for Delwin Vriend), Chancellor Doug Stollery (co-counsel for Delwin Vriend), Michael Phair (chair of the U of A Board of Governors), Julie Lloyd (Alberta’s first openly gay judge and an intervener in the Vriend case) and Kris Wells (director of the U of A’s Institute for Sexual Minority Studies).

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